Triangles With Linear Qualities
by rcaqua
Summary: Jacob doesn't even like geometry.


Triangles With Linear Qualities

"So this angle is the sine?"

Bella bites her lip uncertainly. "I think so. I'm a dunce at math, though."

He grins at her. "Which is why we should ditch this homework thing and go back to being irresponsible."

"You know we can't do that. We can figure this out. I'm a senior, after all."

"I wonder how you made it," he mutters.

This bit of honesty earns him a swat on the arm.

"You're not leaving until we've figured this out," she tells him.

"I guess we'll just have to tell Charlie I'm moving in. Dad will be okay with it. He says I've been eating too much."

Bella carefully avoids saying anything. He pretends to glare at her. Pretends, because his face might be set in the expression, but there is no meaning behind it. How can he be anything but pleased - ecstatic, really - that he's here, in Charlie's house, with Bella?

"We are going to do this," she tells him, and it sounds like she's been watching more of those motivational talk shows, the kind where people pretend to talk to the dead and counsel the bereaved. She has the voice, the patented twenty-dollar-a-tape intonation that is all fake enthusiasm and false hope.

"Sure, sure," he says, and he grins at her again, because there is nothing else he can do. "Time to unlock the great geometric mysteries of the triangle."

_i. any two points can be connected in a straight line_

The distance between La Push and Forks has never seemed shorter.

Jacob knows that road better than his own bedroom now. In his room, he only sleeps. On the road to Bella's house, he dreams.

She is broken, of course. There are whole parts of her that he will never know, because she keeps them locked away in her empty shells of eyes and only thinks about them when something forces her to. So he shouldn't dream, shouldn't hope, shouldn't dare to believe that there might be something to _them_ and not just _her_.

Yet the distance between them grows a little less each day, and the threads connecting his heart to hers are only getting stronger.

_ii. any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line _

He wishes he could stop.

It would be so much easier for everyone if he could wake up one morning (afternoon, more likely, with the shifts he's been pulling) and not love her.

He doesn't rejoice in the love tying him to her anymore. His love and her love (and one day she will admit it's love, she _will_) just make things worse. It makes her fate, his, no matter if that sounds ridiculous. If she becomes a bloods- one of _them_, she will take his heart with her.

What irony, he thinks, and the smile she called Sam's twists his lips.

Yes, it would be much easier if he didn't love her. It wouldn't do to have a werewolf with a vampire's heart.

Yet her (still beating, for a while, at least) heart is linked too tightly with his for him to let go. These are threads that go through them both, and for the life of him he can't figure out why they haven't given way. Even the irrevocable knowledge that she is willing to kill herself for that leech (there, he said it, and he doesn't care if she does hate that word) wasn't enough to destroy them. The threads remain in place, communicating pain and sorrow in place of love.

He doesn't wonder if he'll ever be free. He knows he's not. They are bound for good, and for every step away from him she takes, the threads just go with her.

_iii. given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center _

Bella is the center of everything. Always.

It was the fundamental truth of his life; the pack hated it. She was the reason for everything. He grew his hair because she liked it better that way, made his bed because she was always so neat, ate his breakfast because he knew she would want him to be healthy.

He breathed for her, fought for her, was willing to die for her.

It was so funny that Cullen did, too. Even the breathing part, because he knew dead things didn't need to breathe, but he'd seen the bloodsuckers faking it all the same.

How could one girl do all of this?

She danced through their lives with two left feet and more layers than any sane person would wear in spring. They should have laughed at her, disregarded her, thought she was insane.

Actually, he did sort of think she was insane. But in a good way.

Her stuffy classical music had pulled them all in - werewolf, bloodsucker, overly-gelled wimp and all the rest of the world, it seemed. She was the UN for mythological creatures, a monsterologist of the highest caliber. She was a wrecking ball, a sign of the apocalypse. She was Bella.

It was impossible not to love her.

_iv. all right angles are congruent_

He doesn't hate Edward Cullen.

He would like to. He even managed it for a short period of time. But that was before he understood it all.

Cullen is just like him. No matter that they are supernatural monsters on opposite ends of the eating-people chart. Little things like that don't matter.

Bella matters.

She loves him. She loves Cullen, too. And they both love her, both want her, both are willing to do whatever it takes to keep her safe.

They both wanted to keep her human – and had to accept defeat when she refused.

It was hard to admit they were connected. Triangle or circle or flipping three-cornered paper hat. The three of them were inevitably linked; their hearts were tangled around her.

And both of them would die rather than admit that out loud.

_v. t__hrough a point not on a given straight line, one and only one line can be drawn that never meets the given line_

He is sick of fucking lines.

They are the only things in his life lately.

Boundary lines and Billy's wrinkles and the stripes on her sweater the last time he saw her. Telephone lines and scratched out phrases and the fault lines in his heart that rip open every time he thinks of her.

His life is a Dr. Seuss book, he thinks. Not _feet, feet, feet,_ but lines, lines, lines.

Life should have an eraser. One of those nice pink ones Bella always brought over when they were doing math homework, only more durable, because those were always worn down to stubs by the time the night was over. He would take that eraser and undo it all. Vampires and werewolves and every line in between.

He would erase all the lines that were stronger than his, the ones that pulled Bella away and urged him on.

Yet there is no eraser. There is only Jacob Black, the werewolf, and there isn't a single Virgo in sight.


End file.
